Do you still remember having to flash a "passport" before entering the foodcourt of a mall?
Remember wearing masks to go to the bank, enter an office, or enter a store?
Or has this all been forgotten already, as you prepare for your next media-ordained adventure?
Ron Unz wrote:...Consider the story of Vioxx, a highly lucrative anti-pain medication marketed by Merck to the elderly as a substitute for simple aspirin.
After years of very profitable Vioxx sales, an FDA researcher published a study demonstrating that the drug greatly increased the risk of fatal strokes and heart attacks and had probably already caused tens of thousands of premature American deaths. Vioxx was immediately pulled from the market, but Merck eventually settled the resulting lawsuits for relatively small penalties, despite direct evidence the company had long been aware of the drug’s deadly nature.
Our national media, which had earned hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue from Vioxx marketing, provided no sustained coverage and the scandal was soon forgotten.
Furthermore, the press never investigated the dramatic upward and downward shifts in the mortality rates of elderly Americans that so closely tracked the introduction and recall of Vioxx; as I pointed out in a 2012 article, these indicated that the likely death toll had actually been several times greater than the FDA estimate. Vast numbers of Americans died, no one was punished, and almost everyone has now forgotten...
Without the ability to remember and analyse recent history, our society is acting like zombies following instructions without thinking.
...Author James Bovard has described our society as an “attention deficit democracy,” and the speed with which important events are forgotten once the media loses interest might surprise George Orwell...
Have you forgotten everything yet? It's your civic responsibility to forget so that you can be quickly reprogrammed.
- By Unthinking Majority
- By FiveofSwords